From what do you draw your inspiration?
TL;DRThe VFX artists draw inspiration mainly from big-budget, scientific-style movies and from science fiction books, citing The Lost Fleet for its attention to scale and time.
Well, it's not mainly other games. We look at big movies that have spent millions in their VFX budget.
Mainly that's our source of visuals.
And we tend to look for movies that have a scientific style to them, more than just doing VFX for the show of it, sort of.
In movies they can get away with a lot of things just because they are making effects right in one shot, but that doesn't really work in our game. So we are very picky about what we are looking at. But also, I don't know about you, but I find a lot of inspiration in some science fiction books. Especially there is a series called The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell. It's a great series about warfare in space, and he has really great descriptions of how this could look, and he's really paying attention to scale and time. So when you're actually dogfighting, they take like two seconds because vehicles are so fast and you just don't know what's happening. I just find it really inspiring, even though I'm not seeing that. It's really cool to read that and just think of those things.
Wow. So you get the inspiration from books. Amazing. I'll write it down. But yeah, if we look at Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, I can see something that I really like, but often I have to try to make it more realistic to suit our game.